Mary at 90: A Lifetime of Cooking (BBC 2)
You might remember that John Major once defined Britishness as warm beer, long shadows on cricket grounds, and old ladies cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.
The BBC went one better. Could anything be more British than Dame Mary Berry baking an apple cake in Alan Titchmarsh’s garden?
In the latest episode of Mary At 90, she set up a makeshift kitchen in the garden with Alan as her sous chef. ‘I’ve never been this scared since I did my exams for horticulture,’ he said as he chopped dill and chives.
By the way, what a garden. It’s four acres, and has taken 20 years of work. Alan certainly looked more at home mowing the lawn than he did at the chopping board. Proper petrol mower, I noticed, not battery.
The two have worked together before, and nattered happily like old friends do. Alan showed off the first cookbook that he gave his wife when they married. You won’t be surprised to learn that it was Mary’s Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book.
Under Mary’s close supervision, Alan made his first-ever cake. It was apple and almond, and the process revealed that, after a long career in television, he still has a few things to learn about the business.
When tipping sponge mix into a tin, Mary told him, you always turn the bowl towards the camera. Who knows when that advice might come in handy?
It was a pleasant enough way to spend half an hour: cooking and gardening in one delightful package. But it could have been fluffier and more insubstantial than a perfect souffle. Mary’s trips down memory lane gave it a bit of depth. She has seen huge improvements in the way we eat.
Mary Berry (pictured left) and Alan Titchmarsh (right) were featured cooking together in the latest episode of ‘Mary at 90’ on BBC
‘When I started, salads were tomato and cucumber, or maybe a coleslaw,’ she said while preparing a modern salad with roasted pine nuts, pesto and a burrata cheese.
The way we cook vegetables has changed, too. As Alan noted: ‘Up in the North, back in the 1950s, you put your (Christmas) sprouts on at the end of November.’
But it’s not just food that has changed. The very way we speak, so it seems, is different. A clip from the mid-1970s showed young Mary giving Judith Chalmers advice on picnic items for youngsters.
There were ham sandwiches, chicken legs with tinfoil to stop the youngsters getting their hands dirty, and rolls with ‘laird’ fillings.
I watched that three times to make sure I’d heard correctly. Because if there was such a thing as a laird filling, it never featured in my mum’s picnic repertoire. What could it have been? Something Scottish perhaps?
It wasn’t until a fourth viewing that I realised. Not laird, but ‘layered’.
– CHRISTOPHER STEVENS IS AWAY.
